A good house

Posted by Aidan Chopra, Product Evangelist

Here’s an interesting article that James found on the BBC website: The UK government has announced plans for a zero-emissions house that meets new standards for energy efficiency and all-around eco-friendliness. Besides that, the article includes images of a SketchUp model. How can we tell? The two little girls with the basset hound on the second floor belong to Scott, our engineering manager.

SketchUp trainers wanted

Posted by James Therrien, Training and Education Manager

NOTE: This post is very old; we are no longer seeking SketchUp trainers.

Want to try your hand at being a SketchUp trainer for a year? We have several full-time (but temporary) trainer positions open in the U.S. While working with Google under a year-long contract, you’ll see the country, train folks on SketchUp, and get paid for doing it. Ideal candidates are folks who love to show off their SketchUp skills publicly and love helping others. If you’re an expert in SketchUp and have a professional background or education using SketchUp, please forward your resume to training@sketchup.com.

Update Training positions are no longer listed on the Google jobs website, so here’s some more information about them:

Responsibilities:

• Weekly travel to training locations around the US
• Lead training classes of up to 10 students
• Learn and employ SketchUp training content and methods
• Provide all required feedback and expense reporting
• Other duties as assigned

Requirements:

• BA/BS degree
• Experience with SketchUp or other complex 3D or DTP design software
• Ability to communicate complex issues/concepts clearly and effectively.
• Comfort in public speaking
• Experience in adult learning is helpful

If you’re interested, please forward your resume to training@sketchup.com.

Photoshop gets a little less 2D

Posted by Brian Brewington, Software Developer

People who get to be visually creative for a living (and those who are creative just for fun) already know and love Photoshop. Just recently, in Photoshop CS3 Extended, the good folks at Adobe added the ability to manipulate and modify textures on 3D models, opening up new possibilities for content creation and editing by 3D enthusiasts. In fact, at our users’ conference a couple of years ago, we did an informal poll and learned that a huge number of Sketchup users are into Photoshop, too.

So when our 3D Warehouse team met with the Photoshop team a few months ago, it was pretty natural to wonder, “Wouldn’t it be cool if Photoshop users could grab models out of the 3D Warehouse?” That’s how the plug-in idea was born. A bit of coding later, we’ve got our first version. Now CS3 Extended users can take advantage of the creativity of 3D modelers from around the world who’ve shared their stuff on the 3D Warehouse. And in case you had any doubt, the plug-in is free.

Getting started with the plug-in is pretty simple, really. If you’ve got a copy of Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended, just download the plug-in and put it in your Photoshop Plugins/Automate directory. Once you’ve got it, choose File > Automate > Search Google for 3D Model (in Photoshop), pick your favorite model, and you’ll be off and running.

Whether it’s a sports stadium, a fast car, a cartoon character, some expressionist art, or whatever this thing is, just grab a model out of the 3D Warehouse using the plug-in, and customize it to get the look you want. Have fun!

Adding color to your Earth snapshots

Posted by Nathan Kohrmann, Geomodeler

With a little effort, you can substitute a higher-resolution, color image for the black and white snapshot that appears when you import context into SketchUp from Google Earth. It’s a nice way to get started when you’re building geolocated models. Here’s a video that explains the process, and a step-by-step procedure, just in case you want to file it away for later.

1. In Google Earth, frame the view you want to send to SketchUp. Be sure to hit the “R” key on your keyboard to orient your view to North, and to make sure you’re “looking” straight down at the ground.
2. Choose File > Save > Save Image to save a color JPEG of your view in Google Earth.
3. In a new SketchUp file, choose Tools > Google Earth > Get Current View to import what you see in Google Earth into your SketchUp modeling window.
4. Right-click on your black and white “snapshot” and choose Unlock from the context menu.
5. Choose View > Hidden Geometry to make the edges of your snapshot visible as dotted lines.
6. Double-click on your unlocked snapshot to begin editing it, then single-click on it to select it.
7. Choose File > Import to open the Import dialog box.
8. Find the color JPEG you saved in Step 2, make sure “Use As Texture” is selected, and click Import.
9. Apply the color image from Google Earth to your black and white snapshot as a texture. To do this, click on the corner of the black and white snapshot that corresponds to the corner of the color image which is attached to your cursor, then click on the corner diagonally opposite the first.
10. Right-click on the color image texture you just applied and choose Texture > Position from the context menu.
11. If you see four yellow pins at the corners of the image, skip the rest of this step. If the pins are different colors, right-click on the image and deselect “Fixed Pins” in the context menu.
12. Click and drag each yellow pin to the precise corner of the rectangle to which the image texture is applied. Most likely, the only two pins you need to move are the ones you didn’t “place” in Step 9.
13. Right-click on your image and choose “Done” from the context menu.
14. Right-click on your image again, and choose “Projected” from the context menu.
15. Double-click elsewhere in your modeling window to stop editing your image texture.
16. Right-click on your snapshot and choose “Lock” from the context menu.
17. Outline the roof of the structure you want to model, creating a face.
18. With the Paint Bucket tool, Alt-Click (Command-click on a Mac) on the (now colored) snapshot to sample the texture, then click on the face you drew in the previous step to paint it.
19. Push/pull the face you just created into a 3D form. At this point, you’ll probably want to paint the sides of your form with a less distracting texture. (I suggest a lovely beige.)

Create animated models for Google Earth

Posted by Aidan Chopra, Product Evangelist

I remember the first time I saw the shadows feature in SketchUp; I just about broke my ankle getting to my computer to download the software. When someone in our office first noticed Keyhole (which is what Google Earth was called before it was acquired), all work came to a grinding halt while everyone spent the afternoon flying around the world.

Now somebody’s figured out a way to combine two very cool things – shadows plus Google Earth – into a single, delicious entity. In the file that James Stafford of barnabu.co.uk produced, you can watch a SketchUp model of the London Eye actually rotating in Google Earth. As if that weren’t enough, he also created a series of overlays that let you watch the Eye’s shadow move, too. Check out James’ blog post to download the Google Earth KMZ, and to read about how he put it together.

Update The link in the last sentence nows goes to the correct place.

There’s something living under our noses

Posted by Aidan Chopra, Product Evangelist

May is Mustache Month at Google, and (as you can see above) members of the Boulder office did us proud. Over the course of several weeks, these guys made serious, relationship-affecting sacrifices to grow out their lip gerbils. As it was also a contest, the rest of the office voted on winners in three categories. The victors were: Alok, for Most Robust (second-row, middle); Adam, for Most Creative (second-row, third-from-left); and Geoff, for Best Effort (first-row, third-from-right).

If you’d care to vote on your favorite ‘stache, please feel free to comment below. We’ll give a Reader Award to whomever you pick.

Who’s that scale figure?

Posted by John Bacus, Product Manager

You’ve probably noticed the little person who appears in every new SketchUp file you create — in fact, you’ve probably deleted him more times than you can count. Or maybe you’re one of the hundreds of people who delight in doing funny things to him and uploading him to the 3D Warehouse.

Here why he’s there: Sometimes it’s hard to know how big something is when you’re just sketching it out for the first time. So we added a scale figure (a person, basically) to some of our default SketchUp templates. That way, you can rough out an idea by modeling relative to the person, instead of by paying close attention to the Value Control Box. Having a little dude on the screen also helps new users figure out which way is up.

With each new release, we’ve used a different member of the SketchUp team for that scale figure. In SketchUp 6, the lucky victim is Bryce, but we’ve also used Sandra, Greg and me in earlier releases. If you look in the “2D People” collection in the 3D Warehouse, you can see components for lots of other SketchUp folks, too. So next time you’re deleting Bryce, remember that he’s a real person, and that he has feelings, too. Then go ahead and erase him. I do it dozens of times a day – and I sit right next to him.

Evil mad scientists use SketchUp!

Posted by John Bacus, Product Manager

Several weeks ago at the Maker Faire 2007 in San Mateo, a couple of us had the chance to meet and mingle with 20,000-ish of the most interesting and inventive people I’ve encountered in a long time. Nestled in among the macrame aliens, monster Tesla coils and fire-breathing robots, we set up a decidedly low-tech booth where we offered to make a SketchUp model of any project that visitors could think up. We made a bunch of models, including a Cargo Cult banjo, a Trebuchet, a Segway Coat Rack and the Shane 3m telescope.

But the most exciting thing I saw had to be Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories’ Sugar Printer. There are plenty of people looking for ways to build 3D printers on the cheap (the commercial machines still cost mega-bucks), but this one was designed in SketchUp -– and here’s the actual model to prove it. Bryce and I are going to try building one down in the basement. Does anyone know where to get a good price on 5,000 pounds of sugar?

Update Added the above photo, which was taken at Maker Faire by Windell H. Oskay.

The dangerous lovechild of the SketchUpdate and Web 2.0

Posted by Aidan Chopra, Product Evangelist

With the launch of this blog, we of the SketchUp team hereby declare our entry into the geektastic world of Web 2.0 existence. We would like to thank you for checking us out, and we hope you’ll come back often. That’s enough with the formalities.

This blog aims to continue the tradition of informal monologue established by the SketchUpdate, a monthly (in the loosest sense of the term) email newsletter that we’ve been sending out to the SketchUp faithful for the last seven years. Of course, seven years ago, there were no blogs (or podcasts, or wikis), so we thought we were pretty spiffy and au courant ; we delivered a fresh, hot newsletter into hundreds of thousands of email inboxes years before that sort of thing was considered a mild form of assault. We’ll continue to send the SketchUpdate, but we thought we might be able to do even better with a blog. So here we are.

What do we plan to include? In short, everything. The nice thing about blogging (as opposed to e-newslettering) is that this blog can include all the great stuff we didn’t have room for in the SketchUpdate every month. It can (and will) also include images, videos, links to models in the 3D Warehouse, and other things that we think SketchUp users will get a kick out of. Notes from our developers, case studies from our users, tips and tricks from our trainers—the SketchUp Blog is going to be a veritable smorgasbord of SketchUp-related information. We invite you to pig out.

One last thing: you can leave comments on this blog by clicking on the “comments” link at the bottom of most posts. Go nuts!